It was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings whic...h alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

You should go to picture-galleries and museums of sculpture to be acted upon, and not to express or try to form your own perfectly... futile opinion. It makes no difference to you or the world what you may think of any work of art. That is not the question; the point is how it affects you. The picture is the judge of your capacity, not you of its excellence; the world has long ago passed its judgment upon it, and now it is for the work to estimate you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Burke and Adams had much in common. Adams read Burke's Philosophical Inquiry, for example, as part of his preparation for life and... a career. Burke--who had sympathized with the American Revolution--after all, the patriots were only seeking their rights as Englishmen--became the avowed enemy of the French Revolution. Adams for his part was not only a thinker, he was a doer: a daring patriot, diplomat, vice-president and president. Yet he never abandoned the life of the mind, as his discourse against the French Revolution attests. Burke and Adams had their similar views on events because they each saw man as disposed to selfishness, requiring public institutions to which civic allegiance is owed to restrain those ignoble instincts so that the virtuous side of people would have a chance to flourish. It was, oddly, an optimism based on a pessimistic estimate of human nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty on...e can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

If I were asked what are the greatest obstacles to the speedy enfranchisement of women I should answer: There are three; the first... is militarism.... The second obstacle is the unconscious, unmeasured influence upon the estimate in which women as a whole are held that emanates from that most debasing of our evil institutions, prostitution.... [ellipsis in source] The third great cause is the inertia in the growth of democracy which has come as a reaction following the aggressive movements that with possibly ill-advised haste enfranchised the foreigner, the Negro and the Indian. Perilous conditions, seeming to follow from the introduction into the body politic of vast numbers of irresponsible citizens, have made the nation timid.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It is painful to recall a past intensity, to estimate your distance from the Belsen heap, to make your peace with numbers. Just to... get up each morning is to make a kind of peace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

If we eliminated the dog from our lives, nothing much would happen to our ecology. Independent of man, the dog is a vandal. With m...an, he does a little sheep-herding, a little watch-dogging. He helps law enforcement officers control the troublesome ghetto-dwellers and protest marchers. He sniffs out "hash" and "grass." He goes out on weekends and helps man murder other forms of life for pleasure. But mostly he is just an adjunct to man's ego.... The cat owes man nothing. Some experts estimate that there is one homeless cat managing on its own for every one with a home, which makes a total cat population in the U.S. of more than fifty million. That means the largest nonhuman animal population in the nation, short of rodents, whose number is beyond estimate. Eliminate cats from our ecology and, in a matter of weeks, we would be overrun by rodents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief whic...h determines the consequences it believes in.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, "Know thyself," and too often leads to a self-estimate which wil...l subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »